Modem Futura

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Built, Not Born: What SpudCell Asks Us About Being Alive

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When a cell is built, not born

It’s ALIVE! Wait, no - wait, yes - err no - wait, Maybe?

Every so often a piece of science arrives that's less interesting for what it does than for the question it forces you to sit with. SpudCell is one of those.

Announced this summer by Kate Adamala's lab at the University of Minnesota and reported by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, SpudCell is a synthetic cell built from the bottom up — assembled from lab chemicals rather than descended from a living parent. It has a lipid membrane. It carries a small, engineered genome. It metabolizes, grows, and — remarkably — divides. It does most of what we expect a cell to do. It also, by the researchers' own cheerful admission, looks like a potato.

The temptation is to file this under "cool science" and move on. But the more time you spend with it, the more it turns into a mirror. Because SpudCell does enough of what living cells do that our usual definition of alive starts to wobble. One of the researchers offered the most honest framing available: life is not binary. There is no single test the cell passes or fails. There's a cluster of behaviors we associate with life, and SpudCell exhibits most of them — which means "synthetic" is no longer a clean fact about the object. It's closer to a decision we make.

And it gets harder from there. When a synthetic cell divides, is the copy still synthetic? At what point, if any, does something cross from made to alive? These aren't rhetorical flourishes. They're the questions that will shape how this technology is regulated, funded, and imagined — the kind of governance work scholars like ASU's Emma Frow have been doing in synthetic biology for years.

There's genuine promise in the frame, too. Cells engineered this precisely could become micro-factories: producing proteins and medicines on demand, or acting as a responsive second layer of immunity. That's a hopeful future. It's also, unavoidably, a future that arrives holding hands with new safety and biosecurity questions. Both things are true at once, and the honest move is to hold them together rather than pick the more comfortable one.

What we keep returning to on Modem Futura is that these edges — where the technical meets the definitional — are where the human stakes actually live. SpudCell isn't asking whether we can build a cell. We can. It's asking what we mean when we call something alive, and whether that word still does the work we need it to.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4fMcFDN

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7yAfMf8JsGztjSUJueMbM6?si=_BusGR3OS1OK-lewJGJ4XA

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/MZtGt8ujmxk

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   

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When the AI Goes Dark: What the Fable Ban Taught Us About Digital Fragility

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They turned off our AI - now what?

What happens when the government switches off an AI?

For most people, AI is a text field in a browser window: you type something in, something useful comes out. That framing makes it hard to see what AI has quietly become for organizations across research, healthcare, education, and industry, all critical infrastructure. And in the summer of 2026, we learned just how fragile that infrastructure can be.

In this episode of Modem Futura, hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard unpack the saga of Anthropic's Fable, the most capable AI model yet released to the public. Three days after launch, a U.S. Commerce Department export control directive declared it a national security concern, barring access for non-U.S. citizens. Because no platform can verify the citizenship of its users, the model effectively disappeared for everyone — including the researchers inside Anthropic who built it. Weeks later, it returned as suddenly as it left.

The episode treats this less as a news story than as a signal. Futurists have long used sudden technology loss as a hypothetical scenario; like the pandemic scenarios that preceded 2020, it has now crossed from the abstract to the lived. Once that happens, the questions change, if a government can switch off a frontier model at the close of business on a Friday, what does responsible AI adoption look like for a hospital, a university, a business? Where is the line between experimenting on the fringes and building your operations on ground that can move?

One answer explored in the conversation is local AI — smaller models running on hardware you control. They can't match the capability of cloud-based frontier systems (yet) and the hosts are honest about that trade-off. But the Fable episode gave the local argument its first piece of hard evidence, and it may point toward a future of hyper-specific local tools working alongside more powerful, more revocable cloud platforms.

The deeper thread is governance, and even the invocation of the big R-word (regulation). The directive was triggered by capability that regulators had never seen before, and capability is not slowing down. Governing technologies like these will take more than technologists and more than policymakers — it requires people who can work across disciplines, translating between the builders, the philosophers now being hired into AI labs, and the institutions trying to keep up.

The episode doesn't land on tidy answers, because there aren't any yet. What it offers instead is a way of thinking about dependency, sovereignty, and resilience while the ground is still shifting — which is, after all, when thinking matters most.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4ykQCez

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1yCGEa1nafYu9CM4Mxux5Z?si=jPTtglvnRGW_qHtXqPbFvA

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/7ir38k4DjLA

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   




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Summer Reading for Futures Thinkers: Part Two of the Modem Futura List

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What makes a book worth your summer? On the concluding half of our annual summer reading list, an answer kept surfacing: the best stories are the ones that don't end when you finish them — the ones that plant an idea you can't shake, and that keeps growing into something uniquely yours.

Part two of the list ranges well beyond the cyberpunk canon we explored in part one. Andrew Maynard opens with Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, a satire of university life so accurate that anyone who has worked in academia will cringe in recognition — and one that connects, unexpectedly, to our recent conversation about enshittification: where does the true value proposition of our institutions actually live? His bonus pick, Pratchett's often-overlooked Bromeliad trilogy, is a reminder that the best children's books are age-agnostic.

Sean breaks the pattern entirely with Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment — the landmark photography collection, still available through the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. It sparks a meditation on analog intentionality: how portable cameras created street photography, why a single frame can hold an entire technological era, and the idea that every photograph has two subjects — the one in the frame, and the one behind the camera.

Time travel threads through the middle of the list. Connie Willis's Blackout and All Clear are historical novels wearing the lightest science fiction overlay, following future academics who live through the London Blitz. And La Jetée, Chris Marker's 1962 short film told almost entirely in still photographs, proves that sixteen minutes and a compelling idea can seed decades of storytelling — you can trace its time-loop DNA through much of what we watch today.

The lighter fare earns its place too: Mick Herron's Slow Horses novels (arguably better than the acclaimed series they inspired), the full-cast Harry Potter audio dramatizations, and a return to Silo ahead of its new season. Two friends-and-family picks round things out: Riz Virk's The Simulation Hypothesis and AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard — a deliberately agnostic, tools-based guide to navigating AI with intentionality and care, whether you approach the technology with enthusiasm or deep unease.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4vdP3wf

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1X4nEJUORnt4Txs73mGNeY?si=dB8iH1scSq6rQcwsZgoCnw

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/JHSHtAkTKvk

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   

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Summer Reading List 2026: The Books That Inspired Our Imagination (Part 1)

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Reading Backwards to Understand the Future
There's a particular kind of book list that shows up every summer — the one that seems designed mostly to signal how serious and well-read its author is. This isn't that. In the first part of our annual Summer Reading List, the guiding instinct was the opposite: lasers, space ships, escapism, the kind of book you genuinely can't put down. What we discovered while recording is that the most escapist reads on the list turned out to be some of the most useful lenses on the present.


The cyberpunk classics anchored the conversation. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined "metaverse" and imagined a digital overlay on the physical world years before anyone could plausibly build one. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) did the same for "cyberspace." Both have been mined relentlessly by the technology industry — and both, the hosts argue, are routinely stripped of their context. Snow Crash is a satire and a warning; it's frequently read as a roadmap. That gap, between fiction written as caution and fiction adopted as ambition, is one of the more revealing dynamics in how Silicon Valley tells its own story.

The deeper thread is about cognition. Snow Crash turns on a virus that crosses from the digital realm into the human mind. In an era of AI systems that engage directly with how we reason and feel, that premise reads less like science fiction and more like a description. Iain M. Banks extends the inquiry in Surface Detail, imagining civilizations that construct virtual heavens and hells so immersive that the line between real and simulated experience dissolves — and asking who, if anyone, has the right to govern what happens inside them. His The Player of Games offers a gentler entry point to the same Culture universe, and a sly meditation on whether a frictionless utopia is something humans actually want. We also dive into some of the amazing and seemingly timeless work of Douglas Adams, whose original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts Andrew counts among his prized possessions and whose wit, he insists, anticipated our anxieties about AI with personality long before the chatbots arrived.


The list closes on firmer ground with Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, a nonfiction account of how convenient, delightful platforms decay once users are locked in. It opened onto a question that runs through the whole episode: what do we actually own in a digital age? A printed book from 1980 still works, unconditionally. A digital one comes with terms that can change beneath you. And when the historical record itself becomes editable without a trace, reliability becomes something we can no longer take for granted.


None of these tensions get resolved here — they aren't meant to. The takeaway is quieter and more durable: stories written decades ago remain among our best instruments for thinking clearly about technologies their authors never lived to see. Part 2 continues the list next week.


Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/444V3ws

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5TXSx0QgY4CxUhWsJSF5wm?si=lHeVVcWHS5qE3wd5lFJl5w

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/KN8iEA5tfiQ

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   




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The Quiet Convergence: Reading the WEF's 2026 Emerging Technologies List

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Every year, the World Economic Forum releases its Top 10 Emerging Technologies report — and every year it offers something more useful than a list of gadgets. It offers a read on where the genuine cutting edge is maturing: not the technologies dominating the news cycle, but the ones that have quietly reached the point where companies are investing, where the science has left the lab, where impact is becoming plausible.

This year's list is worth sitting with, and not only for the individual entries. Read together, the 2026 technologies tell a story about convergence.

An energy backbone. Three of the ten cluster around power: everything-to-grid systems that reimagine every building, vehicle, and device as an active participant in a distributed energy network; passive radiative cooling materials that release absorbed heat through a narrow band of infrared that escapes the atmosphere; and direct lithium extraction that addresses the supply bottleneck underneath nearly all modern electronics. None is flashy. All are foundational.

A biological turn. The middle of the list grows intimate. PFAS destruction tackles the "forever chemicals" we engineered to be indestructible — a vivid case study in how today's challenges are so often yesterday's innovations. Precision fermentation turns engineered microbes into microscopic factories for food, medicine, and materials. Exosome drug delivery and personalized mRNA cancer vaccines point toward medicine tailored to an individual genome — in some early trials, transforming survival odds for cancers long considered nearly untreatable.

A compute layer. Underneath runs the quiet infrastructure. Quantum simulation can model molecular interactions that classical computers find effectively impossible, opening once-"undruggable" diseases to discovery. AI world models aim to give machines an intuitive grasp of physical reality — learning through experience, the way a child learns gravity long before learning physics. And lattice-based cryptography hardens our data today against the quantum computers we expect tomorrow.

What makes the list compelling is how readily these pieces combine. Chain the biological and computational threads together and you approach something genuinely science-fictional: scan, model, fabricate, deliver. But convergence cuts both ways. Every capability here carries second- and third-order implications — questions of accountability when machines do the engineering, of unintended consequences when powerful tools meet messy human systems, of who shapes a world that artificial systems increasingly understand on their own terms.

Grab a copy of the full report directly from the World Economic Forum:

The honest takeaway isn't a prediction. It's an invitation to pay attention: to read the report, follow these technologies as they move, and ask not only what they make possible, but what kind of future they quietly assume.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4w3oU4b

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1G17Ta9RvnhPy1Ykrk5M3Y?si=LRMbrXArToas5rMcQF4XLA

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z1cJ-0OD_FM

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   

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The AI Gold Rush Is Real. So Is the Backlash. What Sits Between Them Is Human.

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A curious thing is happening at graduation ceremonies: students have begun booing speakers who mention AI. Meanwhile, builders are using the same technology to do things that seemed impossible three years ago. In Episode 88 of Modem Futura, hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard sit down with venture capitalist Jeff Abbott — founding partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, founder of the global AI Salon community, and Andrew's co-author on *AI and the Art of Being Human* — to explore the widening gap between those two experiences of artificial intelligence.

Abbott offers a rare insider's view of what he calls the new gold rush, and it's stranger than the headlines suggest. Technical moats have largely evaporated; everyone builds on the same foundation models, and those models change without warning. Software itself is becoming liquid — apps described in natural language, generated in seconds, used once, and discarded. A teleprompter for a single video shoot. A custom CRM coded in two weeks. The conversation traces what this means for the future of work, for startups, and for a generation being told AI will transform careers they haven't yet been able to start.

But the episode's most striking turn is inward. Abbott built an AI tool that performs much of his own job — analyzing startups, scoring them, generating reports instantly. What it lacks, he argues, is judgment: the lived experience and relational trust that make venture capital, and arguably every business, a human business. The data crunching is the tip of the iceberg; the weight beneath is intuition and relationship.

The trio also explores one-person unicorns and the "minimum viable human team," why the entrepreneurial mindset matters more than entrepreneurship itself, and a question Abbott poses to his academic hosts: what would an investment framework for human flourishing actually look like? True to form, the episode doesn't resolve that question — it opens it. Because if AI really can do more and more of what we thought defined our work, the things that remain — judgment, trust, knowing where you want to go — start to look less like soft skills and more like the whole point.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4goqIjF

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2JosPwJazSUxYL3iQmf2rj?si=UxJN_WTVTzqif09lqnJN3A

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/YA8vS02lhss

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   

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When the Definition of Life Gets Blurry: Synthetic Cells and the Care They Demand

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We tend to imagine that scientists know exactly what they're making. So it's oddly reassuring — and a little head spinning — to learn that one of the first challenges facing a National Academies committee on synthetic cells was simply agreeing on what a synthetic cell actually is.

That was the starting point for our conversation with Emma Frow, an associate professor at Arizona State University whose work sits at the intersection of bioengineering, science and technology studies, and the governance of emerging biotechnology. Emma served on the committee behind a recent consensus report on the responsible innovation of synthetic cells, and she described spending months wrestling with definitions before any other questions could even be asked.

A spectrum, not a thing

The reason is that "synthetic cell" isn't one technology, is because it is a spectrum of different variations and combinations. At one end is a simple membrane enclosing a handful of enzymes — something that may not be alive in any conventional sense, and that exists in a genuine regulatory gray zone between chemical and biological oversight. At the other end is the long-standing scientific ambition of building a living, replicating cell more or less from scratch. In between are the practical applications driving much of the field: programmable cells for drug delivery, biomanufacturing in bioreactors, and biological substitutes for agricultural chemicals.

Emma offered two clarifying questions that help locate any given creation on that spectrum: Does it contain genetic material? And can it replicate? Those answers shape everything about how seriously, and in what way, we ought to pay attention.

The mirror in the lab

The conversation's most striking turn concerned "mirror life" — organisms built from the reversed molecular handedness of all known biology. Every living thing we've found uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed DNA. A mirror organism would invert that. For years this was framed as a potential safety feature: something so alien it couldn't interact with existing life. But the scientific community has since questioned that assumption, and in late 2024 a group of leading researchers called for restraint, warning that a self-replicating mirror cell could pose risks we'd have no evolutionary defense against.

Care as an ongoing practice

What gives the episode its center of gravity isn't the specter of catastrophe. It's Emma's insistence that care isn't a box you check once. It's a posture you maintain throughout the work — and one the biotech community, by necessity, has cultivated more deliberately than some faster-moving fields. Biology resists the move-fast ethos. There is no perfect containment, and some experiments can't be undone.

The result is a conversation less about prediction than about practice: how thoughtful people decide what's worth building when the old categories no longer hold.




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When Your AI Tools Change Beneath You: Reliability, Agency, and the Opus 4.7 Question

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In April 2026, Anthropic released Opus 4.7 — the latest top-tier model in its Claude family — alongside the brief, controversial preview of an unreleased model called Mythos. For most casual users, the rollout was a footnote. For those who had built creative, professional, and research workflows on top of Claude, it surfaced a question that has been quietly waiting beneath the surface of every cloud-based AI tool: what does it mean to depend on something that can change without notice?

In this episode of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I sit with that question. Drawing on a clearly traceable timeline of recent shifts — adaptive thinking made mandatory, verbosity caps that constrain output length, opaque routing tiers that decide on the user's behalf which version of "Opus" they're actually getting, and expanded safeguards that have begun blocking legitimate creative and academic work — they trace the slow erosion of confidence many users have started to feel in tools they had come to rely on.

But this episode is not a product review. It's a meditation on the broader phenomenon these shifts make legible.

What is the cost of building deep professional and creative reliance on platforms that are, by design, liquid? When a tool's behavior can change hour by hour, what kind of agency do users actually retain? Is there a future in which frozen or locally-hosted models become a quiet luxury for serious users — and what would we trade to get there? And, perhaps most strikingly, what does it mean that AI may be the first genuinely “relational” technology in modern life — one whose value depends on a working relationship that, by its nature, can never be fully held still?

Along the way, we share two practical workarounds: one for getting better writing out of a model that has started feeling stiff, and one small "canary in the coal mine" trick that any user can borrow today to detect when their model has quietly drifted.

What emerges is not a verdict on Opus 4.7, or on Claude, or on Anthropic. It is, instead, an honest conversation about the strange new work of staying thoughtful while the tools beneath us continue to shift — and a reminder that as these systems become more deeply embedded in our work, our research, and our creative lives, the most important question may not be how powerful they get, but how knowable, how stable, and how ours they remain.

This is the kind of conversation Modem Futura was made for: technology examined not as inevitability, but as a sociotechnical relationship we are all, quietly, still negotiating.

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.



🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4f0tMlg

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1csL79s3FtL5tGYVh7BZdW?si=BsQ2t39DQcCy6V--ArPwOQ

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZdHVLfxjsr8

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   

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The Jagged Frontier: Reading the 2026 Stanford AI Index

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Every year, Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute releases its AI Index — a careful, voluminous attempt to map where artificial intelligence actually stands. The 2026 edition, just released, runs over 400 pages. On the newest episode of Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard work their way through its top takeaways and sit with what the data is — and isn't — telling us.

The report opens on a striking juxtaposition. Today's frontier AI models can win gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, yet still stumble on tasks as ordinary as reading an analog clock. Stanford's researchers call this the jagged frontier of AI — and it's more than a quirk. It's a reminder that these systems are not human intelligences being perfected. They are something structurally different, with capabilities and failure modes that don't map neatly onto ours. The interesting question isn't how close AI gets to human thinking. It's what becomes possible when we stop asking it to.

A second thread running through the 2026 Index is the lag in responsible AI. Safety benchmarks are falling behind capability. Incidents are rising. And, as Maynard points out in the episode, the conversation keeps collapsing “responsible” AI into “ethical” AI — two related but meaningfully different things. Ethics gives us the framing. Responsibility asks us to make real, pragmatic, often messy decisions about value, trade-offs, and whose futures we're building toward.

The education findings are equally hard to look away from. Over 80% of students are now using AI for school-related tasks, yet only half of middle and high schools have AI policies in place — and just 6% of teachers describe those policies as clear. Learning is happening. Institutional support is not yet meeting it.

Other findings threaded through the conversation: the closing US–China model performance gap, the fragile TSMC chokepoint at the center of global AI supply chains, and the fifty-point perception gap between AI experts and the public. Each opens a different kind of question about how this technology is being built, distributed, and absorbed.

None of these tensions resolve cleanly — and that's part of what makes the Index valuable. It gives us a shared map for a landscape that keeps shifting under our feet.

📘 Read the 2026 AI Index: https://hai.stanford.edu

Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3QxxQiZ

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0bTUTHRsLWedLuYbLOiz3j?si=I8j0ahK8RBeXPIhVqqM9tw

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/xnCWMLJ_hsA

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/   

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Three Horizons Framework & Futures Wheel Explained

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There's a reason some organizations consistently seem to see disruption coming — and it's usually not because they're smarter or better funded. It's because they've built structured habits of thinking about change in multiple time horizons simultaneously, and they've learned how to trace the cascading consequences of a single shift before it becomes a crisis.

Two of the oldest and most reliable tools for doing exactly that are the Three Horizons Framework and the Futures Wheel. In this episode of Modem Futura, hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard break both down in accessible, conversational detail — and show what becomes possible when you use them together.

The Three Horizons Framework

Originally developed by Bill Sharpe and widely used in professional foresight and strategic planning, divides the landscape of change into three overlapping zones. Horizon 1 represents the dominant present — the systems, structures, and assumptions that govern how the world works today. Horizon 3 is the emergent fringe: weak signals, nascent ideas, and early-stage shifts that are observable but not yet mainstream. And Horizon 2 is the transitional space between them — turbulent, hard to define, and full of both opportunity and risk.

The model doesn't tell you what the future will bring. What it offers is a way of *positioning* trends, signals, and innovations in relation to change — helping individuals and organizations understand what to watch, what to act on, and what to prepare for.

The Futures Wheel

Developed by Jerome Glenn in 1971, works differently but complementarily. Starting from a specific change or trend, it maps outward through first, second, and third-order consequences — building a rich, networked picture of how a single shift might ripple through a system over time. It's a brainstorming and sense-making tool, not a prediction engine, and it's at its most powerful when used with diverse groups who bring different perspectives to the same question.

Used individually, each tool offers genuine insight. Used together, they offer something more: a way of understanding not just *what* a signal might do, but *when* and *through which pathways* it might do it.

Whether you're a founder trying to figure out which wave to ride, a strategist scanning for disruption, or simply someone trying to make better decisions in an uncertain world, these tools are worth adding to your thinking practice.

🎧 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube.


Subscribe and Connect!

Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.


🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4sosMdQ

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/58Fdc2SrWodBTbwfxK8Pwm?si=leiCnhRsQxuv-_hnxEeNjQ

📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/eVk6L_VfAkY

🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/